Many existing optical character recognition systems typically provide for optical scanning and recognition of familiar, widely used fonts. Generally, these fonts are predefined and accepted as a standard in the financial community, such as the American Bankers Association.
In such systems, the facility to recognize non-standard fonts, or to accommodate out-of-specification print problems and recognize characters with such problems is virtually non-existent. Generally, when a printed character is somewhat out-of-specification, recognition fails, the character is rejected, and the recognition operation is aborted, with consequent loss of valuable time and effort.
Also, other than providing for the recognition of standard characters, existing systems do not provide for optical character recognition of non-standard (custom) characters.
What is needed and would be useful, therefore, is an efficient and simple way of recognizing out-of-specification characters and custom characters.